Making the Most of Your Effort: Shared Content
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Adding Composition Zones to Shared Content

Composition zones is a revolutionary new feature that allows multiple users to work on portions of a job simultaneously, but that’s not all it does. With standard synchronization, you can pretty easily synchronize instances of text, pictures, and boxes, but what if you need to synchronize multiple groups of objects? It can be done — it just doesn’t work in quite the same way. Synchronizing multiple objects requires the use of the composition zones feature.

This is how it works. Take a look at figure 11. I have the Launch 7 group selected. This is actually a bunch of objects. The dotted seven is a number of QuarkXPress vector objects grouped together. Then, I added the launch text to the left. For the sake of simplicity, I grouped launch and the dotted seven together. Of course, they don’t need to be grouped in order to convert them to a composition zone. Grouping them makes it easier to select all of them at one time.

Figure 11 This Launch 7 is a group that I want to synchronize and use multiple times.

Select the group that you want to convert to a composition zone and choose item > composition zone > create. Alternatively, you could also ctrl + left click or right click on the mouse over the group you wish to convert. From the resulting contextual menu, choose composition zone > create. Check out figure 12 to see what it looks like.

Figure 12 This is a group of objects converted to a composition zone.

To actually use this new composition zone, I need to identify how it will be used. We do that by sharing it. Select the new composition zone, and choose item > share. Alternatively, you could also ctrl + left click or right click on the mouse over the new zone and choose share. When you do that, a dialogue will appear called shared item properties. Quickly I’ll explain the options here. For reference, take a look at figure 13.

Figure 13 This is a look at the shared item properties.

Here’s a quick run down of what the options in the shared item properties dialog mean.

Name This is simply what you wish to call the zone. This is just like when you named the synchronized items at the beginning of this exercise.

Availability (there are two options here):

• This Project Only This means that a shared composition zone can only be used in this project; not other projects.
• All Projects This means that a shared composition zone can be used in other projects as well. These shared composition zones can be accessed by browsing to projects with shared items via the linked layouts tab under file > collaboration setup.

Make Internal/External (this option determines how and where the new composition zone should be saved):

• Internal If the composition zone is stored internally, then it will be saved inside the current project almost like an additional layout.
• External If the composition zone is stored externally, then an entirely new project will be generated and saved wherever you indicate.

Show Tab in Project Window (only available when saving internally only, of course):

• Checked The new composition zone can be displayed as an extra layout in your project so that you can get to it in a single click.
• Unchecked The new composition zone will be — for lack of a better phrase — hidden. To make edits to the composition zone, select the composition zone and choose item > composition zone > edit. This will open the composition zone in a new project.

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